Rhonda: So what were you looking at in that study? What was...?

Roland: Well, the study in long-term meditators is something that's...it's near and dear to my heart because I'm a long-term meditator now.

Rhonda: Define a long-term meditator.

Roland: Well, these are people by and large that have a daily meditation practice for, very often, decades, and have done a number of prolonged silent meditation retreats. So these are people who have spend a lot of time...

Rhonda: Vipassana or something, that it's called? Something like that?

Roland: Exactly. A lot of it is mindfulness. We have overrepresentation from Buddhist traditions and vipassana could be one of those traditions. And so during that study, people come into our session room. We have them do series of meditations throughout the day. And when they get psilocybin, so we're very interested in how the phenomenology of those experiences change. We're comparing it to placebo. We're looking at pre and post neuroimaging to see...looking for brain changes, and preliminarily, we're seeing day-after changes which is exciting and gets to this whole issue of neuroplasticity. And we also have a condition in which we actually administer psilocybin to people in the scanner. So we're looking at meditation when people are on, in this case, a pretty low dose of psilocybin.

And our interest there in meditation is that we think of meditation as kind of the tried-and-true path for exploration of the nature of mind. I mean, that's really what it is, is that this is methodology that's been developed over thousands of years to turn the attention inward and watch one's own mental processes and become familiar with the way mind works, how it's constructed, and then through that process, very often, people...I hesitate to say gain control, but in effect, they can change the repertoire with which the brain is activated. They can watch thoughts come up. They can release thoughts in a way that someone who's unpracticed with meditation is much less likely to be able to do so.

So it's an investigation of the nature of mine. And similarly, I've come to think of psilocybin as also a convergent methodology for investigation of the nature of mind. It's the meditation on steroids, if you will because there's such abrupt shift of the nature of consciousness that it wakes people up to the extent to which kind of their normative cognitive processes or the normative way they hold reality is just one way of holding reality. And so there can be something shockingly interesting about that.

However, psilocybin is not a substitution for meditation because it doesn't lead to any stability of the awareness state. So we would say that meditation is kind of the tried-and-true way of stabilizing the nature of awareness and coming to understand mind, and psilocybin might be the crash course in that.